What is Email Deliverability?

Email deliverability is a hot topic among email marketers.

It’s easy to understand why.

No doubt you probably spend a lot of time trying working on your email marketing strategy.

That means writing persuasive copy to drive attention. Plus, if you know what’s working in email right now, you’re also likely creating eye-catching images and big ‘click here’ or ‘buy now’ buttons too.

So you put in all that time to genuinely make good emails and then…drumroll…there’s not much of a response.

You take a look at some of the stats from your email service provider and notice that your hard-crafted emails aren’t even hitting the inbox of quite a few of the people on your list.

It looks like you have an email delivery problem.

But, before you can work on solving it, you need to know the basics, and that’s what we’re going to cover in this post.

What is email deliverability?

That’s the big question. But, before you get too deep on what you can do to help fix these problems, you have to understand what it is first and realize that getting your email delivered to an inbox is not guaranteed.

The easiest way to think about email deliverability is by looking at the results first.

If you send out an email campaign and the intended emails have ended up in your subscriber’s inboxes according to plan, then you’ve got a success. This is what’s going to happen for the majority of emails.

But, if you send out your email campaign and your emails never hit the inbox because they’re automatically moved to the junk folder or get blocked by an internet service provider (ISP), then you have a problem.

In a 2018 report, approximately 15% of emails in the US are not hitting the inbox. That’s a pretty significant number, especially if you have a large list and you really rely on email to help push your product or service.

Then there’s the issue of SPAM. If too many people do see your emails but decide they are too spammy that can have an impact on the delivery rates for future campaigns as well.

A smaller issue but one that you should still pay attention to is bounce rates and bad email addresses. It’s normal for every list to have some of these, but if you consistently see lots of bad emails on your list you want clean those out too.

First, it’s pointless to have them sitting in there and second removing these can help give you a better picture of your overall email marketing metrics.

So, you can see, there are quite a few things that go into email deliverability that you need to pay attention to over the long run. This post covers some of the most common issues impacting email deliverability.

Why email deliverability matters

A not insignificant number of your email subscribers could never actually see your emails for a variety of reasons. And not getting the emails you send out has knock-on effects on your business too.

Lower email open and click rates can translate into fewer conversions overall. You never get a chance to convince people who might be interested to buy or take action.

Then there are the people on your list who are primed to buy but never know what you’re offering (especially if it’s what they want) because they never see your emails.

Both of these can have severe impacts on the bottom line of your business. For many companies, email is an important marketing channel that brings in a lot of revenue, so not being able to tap into that for all it’s potential is damaging.

That’s a primary reason why email deliverability is so critical to pay attention to, especially if you’re ramping up your email marketing efforts. You want to know how email deliverability works and where you could potentially see issues to nip them in the bud before they become bigger problems down the road.

Ready to attack your deliverability stats?

Good, that’s exactly what we like to hear.

There are plenty of ways you can improve your email deliverability and see better engagement with your emails, which can then help improve those open, click-through, and conversion rates.

Start with looking at how you can improve the deliverability of your emails through content.

Ask yourself a few questions.

Are your emails eye-catching? Do they embrace interactive content to get people actively engaging and building rapport with your brand? Are you always looking to improve your sender reputation?

Answer yes to these, and you’re off to a great start.